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Neil adjusts the worn-thin strap of his duffel bag and takes a breath.
The air smells like the end of summer, like autumn closing in with the slow grace of the south’s reluctant seasons. It’s trees and flowers, sun and dry air. It’s his new chance, his last stop, and the best part of his foreseeable future.
Neil closes the door of the truck, giving a nod of thanks to the woman who’d let him ride along with her. The Palmetto campus is still a couple miles away—too far out of her way, the truck driver had said, apology clear in her voice and that strange hesitance to let him go alone that Neil gets too often.
He doesn’t care. He’s walked farther before, and will again.
Neil shoulders his duffel and his new identity and the daunting weight of his future and starts walking.
…
Neil is assigned to a dorm with five other boys and too little space.
The room is longer than it is wide, five beds and five desks lined up neat. It reminds him of a hospital, the careful order and pattern of it. The mess, however, is far from the sterile environment he’s long been wary of—there’s clothes and textbooks scattered around, socks hanging from the light fixtures and Exy racquets propped against the far wall. It’s that, more than anything else, that makes Neil relax just a fraction.
The man who led him to the room leaves him with a nod and a stack of papers, disappearing down the maze of hallways without a word.
Neil steps through an open door into an empty room.
His room, now, for better or worse.
…
It’s definitely for worse.
His new roommates are strange, too-friendly or completely unfazed by his presence.
There’s Nicky, loud and excited, who offers to show him around campus. Neil takes him up on it, half for the sake of his new identity and half because he wasn’t given a map. He can memorize routes and rarely gets lost—a natural ability, only heightened by his years on the run—but it’s a useless skill without seeing the place first.
Neil ignores that he could get the same effect wandering around on his own. It’s his last year to actually enjoy living, he’s going to make the most of it. (He’s never had a friend, before.)
Nicky’s cousins, the twins, aren’t in the room. Nicky falters when he mentions them in the middle of his enthusiastic introductions, smile breaking and glancing towards the empty beds at the end of the room. Their final roommate, Kevin Day, is gone too—practicing, Nicky laughs, smile turning fondly exasperated.
Kevin Day.
He’s the reason Neil chose this school, the reason he applied for his place. Neil’s father is in prison and his mother is dead. All that’s left of his past is scars and memories. Scars and memories and Kevin Day, all twined together with metal-heavy air and the feeling of slamming a ball away from goal lines on a court.
It’s a bad idea. The worst he’s ever had, maybe, but Neil has little to live for and less to care about. His mother’s memory and his own will to live drive him, but it’s a shallow pool quickly running dry.
So he has Exy, and this one last year, and nothing is taking that from him
…
Neil pushes a stray but of dyed-brown hair out of his eyes, squinting through the sting of sweat.
The court is better than he thought it would be, the best he's ever played on. It's not the biggest or the most wellkept, but it's four walls and painted lines and the smell of old wood and sweat It’s the hum of fans and growling beat of the broken air conditioning, the lingering summer heat and the rush of blood in his ears.
It burns through him, the stripped-down perfection singing through his bones. This is where he belongs—this is where he's wanted to be, all these years away, and being here feels more like coming home than any house or hotel ever has.
Neil watches the team–only ten of them, the smallest he's seen—run warm up drills. Coach Wymack had insisted he sit on the side for today, to watch what was going on.
And to not irritate his injuries. Neil thought he'd been hiding them well, but apparently not well enough. His mother's death had only been a month ago, and cracked ribs take longer to heal. He doesn't care—he's had worse, his fingers crooked from being broken too many times and his torso stripped with scars.
He slows from his run, walking around the outside of the clear walls that seal off the court. Wymack had told him to sit and watch, but Neil, under any name, has never been one for that.
There's only a few minutes left to the class, the clock ticking down and down. Neil feels the loss if it like a physical thing, like water and sand slipping through his fingers.
He follows the team—his team, now—to the locker room and reminds himself he can come back later.
Exy is his now, held tight in his hands and close to his heart, and he's not letting go.
…
Neil meets Andrew last.
He's elusive, slipping away after classes end and coming back past curfew. He disappears again in the morning, before even Neil wakes.
He assumes it's normal, given its established pattern and his roommates lack of care.
Aaron, he does meet. It's only a couple hours after his first day of classes when he walks into the room, finding a blond man in a blue shirt slumped over one of the far desks. It's a short, unpleasant meeting for both of them that involves mostly silence and a lot of glaring on Aaron's part.
Neil resolves to ignore him as much as possible, so as to fit with his new identity. Neil Josten is quiet, unassuming, only here to play Exy and prepare for university.
Nicky insists on sitting with Neil at lunch, and he brings others with him. Neil had tried sitting at a different table the first time Nicky had invited him—Nicky had assumed he'd forgotten that morning's invitation and sat across from him. Not alone, either, but Aaron is often away with the girl he insists he’s not dating and Andrew is ever-absent. Kevin is there, though, and Neil spends his lunches talking about Exy.
After so many years not allowed to talk about it, think about it, his conversations with Kevin feel like broken chains falling away, like sunlight and rain and freedom.
…
It’s several weeks before Neil actually meets Andrew..
He's sitting alone at their window, legs kicking idly against the brick. There's a lit cigarette burning down in his hand, and as Neil watches Andrew take a lazy drag of it. Judging by the pile of ashes and filters, he's finished a pack.
His black armbands and shirt give him away, and the dispassionate expression is something Neil has never seen on Aaron. Aaron has two expressions, around him: annoyed and tired.
Neil steps into the room. Something crinkles under his foot.
There's all the pieces of a plastic and cardboard cigarette box, meticulously separated and laid out like a diagram, like a sewing pattern. Neil walks carefully around it, leaving them arranged as they are.
He doesn't intend to say anything. Neil doesn't think he needs to, just yet.
Neil settles onto his bed. It's the one next to the window, and he sits back to study Andrew.
At first glance, he and Aaron are identical. On further inspection, though, he can pick out the little differences.
Andrew has the same high cheekbones and sharp jaw, same Roman-statue nose and square ears that Neil had noted on Aaron.
Andrew, though, has freckles scattered across his nose, pale enough to be near unnoticeable. His brows are thick but near invisible, a thin scar splitting one into two neat sections.
And Andrew's hair, too, is lighter. Sun-bleach blond turned platinum, almost white.
Neil thinks of the man he'd met once, on the run with his mother. He'd been pale and white-haired, and when he'd caught Nathaniel's furtive glances he'd smiled gently and explained albinism.
Neil inhales cigarette smoke and unease, sitting a little straighter and planting his feet on the floor. He remembers, idly, how pale and colorless the man’s eyes had been, the way they’d bled pink and red in the light.
Andrew turns and catches Neil's gaze and the burning hazel-gold of his eyes is nothing like the clear-ice gray he remembers.
Andrew takes a drag of his cigarette. He’s slow, deliberate, exhaling in a long stream of curling smoke.
"Hello, Nathaniel," he says.
…
Nathaniel had never been told Andrew's first name, and he hadn't recognized him in the pictureless list of his roommates he'd been given.
And then he'd seen Aaron, and Kevin, and it all fell into place.
For nine months Nathaniel and his mother had taken in another child for their cover. His father was looking for a woman and a child, not a single mother of two.
It had been the best part of his life, including his childhood in Baltimore. Alex and Marcus had stayed in an apartment, quiet during the day while their mother alternated between working part time and homeschooling her sons.
Neil remembers long hours spent in silence, remembers teaching Marcus—Andrew—how to throw knives, the correct stance to shoot, the best points to aim for. He'd been twelve and thirteen, then, and Andrew a few years older.
Marcus was the name Andrew used in public, with Mary. Neil had been Alex, just another name among many.
But alone, in those bare hours between sunset and the start of their day, they were Nathaniel and Doe. Nathaniel had never asked his first name, never asked where he came from, never asked where he would go.
He wished, years later, that he had. That he had more to remember in the nights wrapped tight in his mother’s arms, those hours of pain. He’d sew his mother’s wounds shut with neat stitches and list all the things he knew about Doe, taking a strange sort of comfort in his scant collection of facts.
Doe was a foster child.
Doe wouldn’t touch without permission.
Doe didn’t talk about his past, or himself, or much at all.
Doe didn’t like the word please.
Doe was his best friend, his first friend, for all the title was worth.
…
“Doe,” Nathaniel says.
The cigarette burns down. Andrew replaces it with two neat movements, eyes focused and burning brighter than the lighter he uses.
“Andrew,” Neil says, and the world falls into place.
Andrew smiles, a small thing stripped bare and raw and cruel. “Neil,” he replies, and there’s a promise in it.
…
Nicky keeps shooting them half-alarmed glances, ready to step in if he needs to. He’s not at school most of the day—he’s an adult, not technically enrolled, so he works part time off campus.
Kevin had explained it to him, though it hadn’t really cleared anything up. Nicky and Kevin are legal adults, neither enrolled in any classes and too old to qualify anyway, so Kevin is in a position as Wymack’s assistant that comes with room and board.
Nicky isn’t technically allowed to sleep on campus, but the staff turn a blind eye when he crashes in the spare bed and eats in the cafeteria more often than not. He keeps Andrew under control, and it’s not like they could use the bed for anyone else—Andrew threatens every potential roommate to the point of dropping out.
Andrew takes Neil to the roof and they sit for hours, sometimes talking and sometimes not. Neil starts to look forward to that more than any of his classes, sitting with Andrew in a comfortable quiet, knees almost touching.
It continues, months passing like weeks and days like years. Neil’s days are Andrew and Exy, Exy and Andrew and the thrum of safewarmsafe in his chest.
Four months into the school year Andrew asks to kiss him. Neil says yes, surprised but more sure than he’s been of near anything, and Andrew’s mouth is warm on his.
They fall into it, this new thing between them, so naturally it feels like it’s been his—theirs—for years.
Through it all, Nicky’s glances don’t stop. They become less frequent as he adjusts to Andrew and Neil becoming AndrewandNeil, adjusts to the careful concessions Andrew makes. Andrew sits with them at lunch, once, then twice, then three days before he insists in that wordless Andrew way that they move outside. Neil finds him and Aaron sitting alone in the room—to an outsider, it’s a cold silence and the terrible weight of fear and anger. Neil sees it, though, sees the silence for what it is and the slow dismantling of the weight of the past.
Aaron and his no-longer-not girlfriend sit with them at lunch. Andrew does not look at her, which is the best Aaron could probably have hoped for.
Neil doesn’t really care. He doesn’t mind Nicky, and his contact with Aaron is minimal. He doesn’t know why Kevin has to be there, always two steps away from Andrew, doesn’t know why Andrew watches him with that considering intent.
It’s not his business.
He’s here for Exy and Andrew and a final year. He won’t let anything distract him.
…
The letters start four days later.
The campus is old and the technology only slightly less so, with barely-there service and no internet access. The computer lab, full of half-broken screens and keyboards missing letters, looks like it was built decades ago and abandoned despite being only a few years old.
Thus, the mail. Letters are reliable, if slow, and every student gets a packet of mail three times a week. Neil never gets anything, but he’s planning on faking a letter from his ‘parents’ in a few weeks to ward off suspicions.
It’s a Monday, quiet and dreary. Neil’s homeroom teacher passes out the mail with the same defeated air he always has, giving them bare minutes to tuck the letters away before he starts a lecture.
Neil isn’t listening. He’s staring, instead, at the envelope sitting plain and true on his desk.
Neil Josten is written in cramped script in the middle, the address of the school below. There’s no return address, no marks at all.
Then Neil sees the stamp and his breath freezes. It’s innocent, almost, red flowers and a bird that could be a sparrow.
It's the words that he sees, the deliberate threat of it.
Greetings from Baltimore!
…
Neil and Andrew sit in their room, on their pushed-together beds in the corner of their room. Nicky and Aaron are out, and Kevin is snoring lightly in the nearest bed.
It's early evening, the light fading quick and the sounds of the day fading. It's that lull, that pause where the sunlight things settle and the night comes awake. Neil likes this time, usually, sitting with Andrew in the quiet near-dark and watching the stars become slowly visible.
Today is different. Today, Neil has an unopened letter with a ticking time bomb in it, has paper with a threat in factory-print words.
Andrew reaches out, slowly, and takes the letter. He knows about Baltimore, about Neil's father and the way he'd painted his son's life with blood and violent fear.
The sound of ripping paper is too loud, too real for the fading dusk. Neil does not flinch, but he closes his eyes and takes in a deep breath that tastes like acrid cigarette smoke.
Andrew pulls out the single slip of paper, and it seems so small. Too small to cause this much fear, to instill such complete terror.
It has a number, written in Nathan's hand.
Neil looks, and Andrew watches. When Neil's eyes close again, when he turns his head away and sits still and quiet, Andrew moves.
The paper and the letter are deposited on Neil's desk, a neat pile of ashes quickly blown away.
Neil ends the night with the memory of fear chased away by the warmth of Andrew's hands and mouth, by Kevin's snoring and the arrival of Aaron and Nicky. He ends the night unsure, half ready to run, looking for a reason to stay or go or run.
…
The letters continue. Every Monday–Wednesday–Friday, Neil spends first period staring at a bland, clean envelope, too-bright white on the wood print of the desk.
Every letter is the same. Spotless envelope, no return address and no creases or stains. It's too clean to have been in the mailing system, and the thought that one of Nathan's people is close enough to hand-deliver him letters sits shivering and cold at the top of his spine.
Every letter has the same neat, sharp-edged slip of paper in it, counting down. Neil has already counted the days down to zero on a calendar, but there's nothing special about the day it lands on.
Neil hopes it stays that way. He doesn't want his last year to end so soon. He's found a place, here, the Exy courts and Andrew's room and the roof filling that empty space that's sat in his chest since he buried his mother in burning-hot sand.
The letters continue. Neil ignores the countdown and spends his days on the court, on the roof, in his and Andrew's room.
…
They don't talk about Nathaniel and Doe.
They don't exist, anymore, and Andrew and Neil have long reshaped the thing that lies between them. They don't need to be Nathaniel and Doe.
They're Andrew and Neil, AndrewandNeil.
…
Andrew begins to burn the letters. Neil doesn't stop him.
…
Later, Neil remembers his last month at Palmetto in pieces. Flashes of memory, disconnected, still clear and sharp years after.
(He wonders if this is how Andrew's memory is. He doesn't ask.)
He remembers this: the blur of classes and drawn-out night, the glow of a lit cigarette blending into the night sky. The sound of running and the wail of the goal, the weight of his racquet in his hands and his teammates arms thrown over his shoulders. Andrew's mouth, dry and warm against his, whispers of junkie in Andrew's low voice.
He remembers this: the announcer calling their win and the chaos of the stands. Screaming and ambulance sirens, separated from his team and lost in the drove of people.
The point of a knife, familiar and chilling, pressed hard enough to the back of his neck to draw blood.
Lola's voice in his ear. Romero's laughter. The blur of dark and the slam of a car door.
Neil remembers Andrew's cigarette, glowing like a star brought down in the night. He burns, burns, burns.
Lola heats the dashboard lighter again, drawing a knife from her pocket with her other hand.
…
Nathaniel is bloody and not broken, made to kneel before his father.
Nathan laughs and it's grating in its normalcy. It’s the kind of laugh Nathaniel's heard a thousand times walking down the street, commonplace and inescapable.
Nathaniel keeps his face blank and his hands still. He thinks of Andrew's steady strength and sits, silence and stone before the Butcher.
"Nathaniel," Nathan says casually, hands relaxed at his sides and eyes glinting cold amusement. "My son, returned to me."
Neil fights, rising up within him with spitting anger and a razor-edged tongue. Nathaniel presses him down, leveling Nathan with a cold look instead.
"Father," he says, and Nathan smiles.
…
Nathaniel does not sleep.
He sits, bound and bloody, in the dark corner of the basement. Nathan and Lola leave, a man Nathaniel vaguely remembers from a fear-soaked childhood sitting still in front of the door.
Nathaniel knows this house, knows the precautions built into it. The basement they're in is locked away from the main one, built with thick walls and rough concrete floors, connected with a hall and a bank-vault metal door. There's a drain in the middle of the room and the smell of blood hangs thick and metal-heavy in the air.
The floor beneath Nathaniel is stained dark, chipping away in rust-brown flakes under his nails. He knows why, and doesn't think about the hundreds that have sat in his spot, bleeding iron and fear.
Nathaniel sits, and waits.
…
His hands are crossed with cuts and burns. His arms look the same, and the half-faded pain says his face will be in a similar state.
Nathaniel sits, and waits.
He doesn't know how much time passes. He knows he loses consciousness at some point, waking slowly to a plastic cup of water and prepackaged sandwich set on the floor before him.
It chills him to the bone and beyond. Knowing that someone was in here while he wasn't aware, knowing the tactics Nathan uses with his prisoners.
That's what he is, now, that's what the food says. They want him to stay alive longer.
This isn't a quick revenge, a murder to even whatever score Nathan keeps.
This is a capture, a slow torture, a death in stages.
And Nathaniel is helpless against it.
…
Nathan doesn't wear shoes in the basement.
Nathaniel notices it, the thought odd and sharp through the pain.
I hate you, he thinks, closing his eyes against the sight of auburn hair and blue eyes, of a face so much like his. You were supposed to care for me, he thinks, and you killed me instead.
I'll never forgive you, he thinks, his mother's voice ringing in his ears, the tearing of skin from leather, her blood iron in his nose. I wish you had done better.
It's not her blood.
It's not her screaming, either.
…
Nathaniel comes to—not wakes, he doesn't sleep, not truly—when the door flings open, Nathan stalking through with a carefully blank face.
Behind him is a man, shorter and slighter with dark hair slicked back. Nathaniel thinks he looks familiar, but can't place it through the pain-soaked haze of the world.
"Nathaniel," Nathan says, cold and cruel, "stand and greet your guest."
The man clicks his tongue, raining one impossibly neat brow at Nathan. "Now, now, Butcher. Nathaniel is hurt, it would be so cruel to make him stand. He can stay where he is."
The back of Nathaniel's neck prickles. He's been trained to spot the signs of danger, of a threat, and this man screams them all. There's something about the impassive amusement the man wears that both terrifies and reassures Nathaniel.
He forces himself up on his knees. The injuries are surface-level, shallow and already scabbing over. He's a prisoner, and one they want ro keep for a while. It's more dangerous, he thinks, taking stock of the men before him, to offend the stranger than Nathan.
The stranger steps further into the small room, eying the dried bloodstains around Nathaniel with faint distaste. He flicks one hand, efficient and deliberate, and sends Nathan out of the room.
Nathaniel can hear, faintly, Lola's voice, raised in question.
The stranger takes another step forward and beckons again, this time to someone outside the door.
Nathaniel loses any breath he'd had, staring hard at the blond and gold and solid, real presence of Andrew here, with him, in this room.
Neil fights. Nathaniel feels it like a fire in his chest, burning hot and determined.
"Hello, Nathaniel Wesninski," the stranger says, voice light and friendly. "My name is Ichirou Moriyama. Though I wish it were in better circumstances, I am very pleased to finally meet you."
Nathaniel remembers Riko's violence and Kevin's fear, remembers Andrew's stripped-bare recount on the roof at night.
Ichirou Moriyama smiles, and the door closes.
…
Nathaniel stands. His wounds are shallow but many, and they sting with the movement.
He doesn’t care.
All Nathaniel sees is Andrew. He knows it’s stupid to ignore a potenital enemy, to ignore someone who can command the Butcher of Balitmore so easily.
He doesn’t care.
Andrew’s face is passive but his eyes aren’t, fixed and staring hard at Neil’s face. He hasn’t looked away since he enterend the room, and Nathaniel feels the weight of his gaze like a burning, solid thing draped across his shoulders.
He welcomes it. Nathaniel has always been in the habit of extremes.
…
Ichirou tells Nathaniel all the details he thinks relevant, all the things he wants him to consider..
Nathaniel sits and listens, Andrew at his side and the old wood of the creaky stool he’d been given shifting beneath him.
Ichirou’s voice is soft, deliberate and lilting. His words are careful even as they are unending, steady and unhesitating.
Nathaniel listens and watches his world shift, all the things he's wondered and questions and thought he'd never know clicking neatly into place.
And Andrew sits beside him for it all, warm and reassuring.
…
Ichirou doesn't care about Nathaniel. He'd said it outright, even. Nathaniel prefers it that way.
He's letting Nathaniel go. He has no need for him, and he's curious who Nathaniel will be given his future back.
There's a threat in the words, a threat in the easy way Ichirou sits in a house surrounded by the Butcher's people. He hadn't brought a bodyguard, Nathaniel realizes, and it sends a shock of apprehensive fear down his spine.
The smile Ichirou gives him when Nathaniel stands to shake his hand is a bone-chilling threat, is the press of cold metal to his nape and the sound of dirt of coffin-wood.
It's clear ice and sunrise, the quiet death of the thing that haunts and chases him.
Neil watches the glint of the barrel, sure and steady in Ichirou’s hand. A pale finger flexes and the shot rings out, startlingly loud in the stripped-bare silence.
It sounds like chains breaking and the crack of bone, like the slam of a ball against a court and stinging sweat in his eyes.
Neil doesn't cry as his father slumps over, lifeless. Red pools around him, the room filling with the metal-heavy smell of new blood over old.
The Butcher of Baltimore dies quickly and unceremoniously, an insignificant end for the man who caused so much fear. Neil thinks, with that venom born of years spent in bitter terror, that it’s only fitting.
Lola lunges forward, towards him or Ichirou he can't tell. Either way, Andrew stops her, stepping forward to dispatch her with a knife to the throat. She falls, bleeding, to the floor. She’s fighting, still, hands stained where they’re clamped uselessly over her throat.
Ichrirou eyes her twitching form with the faintest hint of disgust. There's no other emotion on his face, but his hands tighten around minisculely around his gun and he gives Andrew a slight nod. “Thank you,” he says, each syllable clear and precise. “Consider your debt paid. A life for a life.”
Neil blinks. It can’t be that simple, that easy. He'd made the deal and
Ichirou smirks like he’s read Neil’s mind—or at least the confusion that must be stark across his face.
“Yes, little butcher,” he says, brushing away an invisible bit of dust. He continues, voice casual and dispassionate, “to be honest, I had intended to have Nathan disposed of rather soon anyway. I have no need of him, or of his runaway spawn.”
“The money—” Neil starts, then cuts himself off. He won’t ruin this.
Ichirou waves a hand dismissively. “Was paid back long ago. The Moriyamas do not care who caused the debt, as long as it was paid. My father marked you as a lost cause when you ran and had your father”—he nods at the corpse—”pay the debt. Why do you think you never encountered Moriyama people, little butcher?”
“Oh,” Neil says, briefly stunned. He frowns. “What debt did Andrew pay, then?”
Ichirow laughs, a surprisingly delicate sound. “The cost of my company, of course. And for sealing away his past. Matricide, I’ve found, always has the most interesting causes.”
Beside him, Andrew hums a flat note and reaches to twine his fingers through Neil’s.
Ichirou’s eyes light on it and Neil tenses, but his gaze is gone as quick as it had landed. Ichirou extracts a phone from his pocket and presses a few buttons, snapping it shut with a ringing click a few seconds later.
“My people will take care of this,” Ichirou says pleasantly, like he’s talking about a household chore and not disposing of two bodies. “Take care, Neil. And do change your name—Wesninski is not yours anymore.”
Neil hears what the words mean, underneath it all. He’s not a Wesninski, not entitled to the benefits it would have given or the persecution it would have earned him.
He doesn’t care. Nathaniel Wesninski dies with his father under a building in Baltimore, curled quiet in his chest and burning into ashes with a breath.
He’s free.
Neil Josten steps into the sunlight, with Andrew at his side and all the potential of the future thrumming through him.